Chapter 22
MARINA
Tommy Ruggiero does not want to be here and he has told me so four times since the bridge.
"He'll have my head."
"He said drive me where I say."
"He said that to Benny."
"And Benny's in a bed with a plate in him, and you're Benny now. So drive."
He drives. He is a big man, bigger than Benny, with a neck that goes straight into his shoulders and hands like he was built for something other than steering wheels, and he has been on my brother's building for two weeks without me knowing his face, and now I know it, and it is a worried face. It does not suit him.
New Dorp Lane on a Tuesday afternoon. A laundromat with a sign that has lost its second O, and a dry cleaner, and a place that does keys, and a door between the laundromat and the dry cleaner with no number on it, and Tommy pulls up across from it and does not turn the engine off.
"Ten minutes," he says.
"Fine."
"I'm coming in."
"You're staying in the car, Tommy, because if a Vitale walks into Sonny Fusco's back room behind me he's not going to say a word to me, he's going to say it to you, and I didn't come here to watch two men talk."
"He'll have my"
"Head. I know. Ten minutes."
I get out. I do not tell him the other reason, which is that I did not tell Salvatore where I was going, and I did not tell him because he would have said no, and he would have said no because there is a bald man standing on his lawn looking up at my window and he has not said one word to me about it in twenty-four hours.
I saw Paulie Gatto. He knows I saw him.
I said it at dinner. Last night, the two of us at the end of the long table with Rosa's chicken between us and the sun of the afternoon still on my skin, still in my mouth, and I waited until he had a fork in his hand and I said, "Your uncle's man was in the garden yesterday."
He put the fork down.
"Paulie Gatto. On the lawn. Looking up at my window while you were asleep in my bed."
"I know."
"You know."
"Matteo saw him from the kitchen. He was gone before Matteo got to the door." He picked the fork up. "I know."
"And?"
"And I've dealt with it."
"How."
He ate. He ate a piece of chicken and he looked at me while he did it, and it was the look from the first night, the one that was the speech, and I sat there and understood that four hours before he had been asleep with his hand open on my pillow and now he was a locked room again and I did not know which of those was the man.
"Salvatore."
"It's dealt with, Marina."
"I'm asking how."
"And I'm telling you it's dealt with." He put the fork down again, gently, and stood, and said goodnight, and went to the study, and the door shut, and that was the whole of it.
I know.
And this morning I went to the pool house, because my brother is the other person in this house who knows something and will not say it, and I sat on the end of his bed and I asked him, plainly, who his friend was, and he looked at the television.
"Nico."
"I don't have a friend."
"You've got a phone."
"I lost it."
"You've got a V on your arm."
He pulled the sleeve down over the gauze. "Mari. Please. I can't. If I tell you, he'll." He stopped. "He said he was helping. He said it was the only way you'd be safe, and I believed him, and you are safe, you're in a house with a gate, so maybe he was right, so maybe I shouldn't."
"Who, Nico."
"I can't."
So I am on New Dorp Lane. Because there is one man on this island who wrote my brother's paper, and he is not family, and he does not love me, and men who do not love you are the only ones who will tell you the truth.
The back room is behind the laundromat, through the laundromat, past four machines going and a woman folding who does not look up, and a curtain, and behind the curtain a room with a desk and two phones and a television with a game on and a man behind the desk who looks up when I come through and does not stand.
"Well," Sonny Fusco says.
He is sixty and he is fat in the way that used to be money and is now just fat, and he has a face like a pillow and a smile that does not open. His lips stay together when he does it. It is the strangest thing I have ever seen a face do, and I have seen faces do most things.
"You know who I am," I say.
"I know who your brother is. He owes me two hundred and twenty thousand dollars." The closed smile. "Or he did. I hear it's been handled. I hear a lot of things."
"I want to ask you something."
"Sit."
"I'll stand."
"You're your father's daughter. He never sat either. Stood right there with his hat in his hand like I was the one who should be nervous." He picks up a pen and puts it down. "Ask."
"My brother's twenty. He's never had a real job.
He's never had more than four hundred dollars in his hand at one time in his life.
And you wrote him credit. Not once. Over and over, for weeks, until it was two hundred and twenty thousand, and you didn't stop, and you didn't cut him off, and a man who does what you do for forty years doesn't do that unless. " I stop. "Unless what."
The game goes on the television. Somebody scores.
"You want to know who vouched," Sonny says.
"Yes."
"Why."
"Because he's got a phone that isn't his and a V cut into his arm, and somebody built the road he walked down to get here, and I want to know whose road it is."
He looks at me for a while with the pillow face.
Then he does something I do not expect. He gets up.
He is slow about it, he has to use the desk, and he comes round it and goes to the curtain and looks out through it at the laundromat and the woman folding and comes back and sits down again, and the smile is gone.
"I've been doing this since nineteen eighty-four," he says.
"I've written paper for cops and priests and I once wrote paper for a man who turned out to be a federal judge, and I've never once been asked to write it for a kid who buses tables.
That's not business. That's charity, and I don't do charity.
So when the call came I said no." He picks the pen up. "And then I said yes."
"Why."
"Because of where it came from."
"Where."
"The House." He says it the way people on the Island say it, with the capital.
"Not the boss. Not Salvatore. He doesn't call me.
Luca calls me, or Dominic, or nobody. But the number on my phone was the House, the office line, the one that's been the same since Carmine's father, and a voice I know said Nico Silvestri's going to come and see you, and you're going to take his action, and you're going to keep taking it, and it's covered. "
"Covered by who."
"By the House. That's what covered means."
"Whose voice."
The smile comes back. Closed. "I didn't say."
"You said a voice you know."
"I know a lot of voices. I've known that house forty years.
I know Dominic's and I know Luca's and I know Aldo Bracci's and I knew Carmine's till he died and I'd know Matteo's if he ever called, which he doesn't." He turns the pen over.
"And I'm not going to say which one, sweetheart, because I'm sixty years old and I'd like to be sixty-one, and whoever put your brother in a van last week knows exactly which one it was and I don't want to be the second thing he cleans up. "
"So you know it was inside."
"I know the phone was inside. That's all I know."
"That's not all you know."
He does not answer.
"Mr Fusco."
"You've had your ten minutes."
"You know something else. You went and looked out the curtain. Men don't look out curtains for things they don't know."
He looks at me with the pillow face for a long time. The game goes to an ad. The woman folds. And he says, quietly, not smiling, "Ask your brother who his friend is."
"He won't tell me."
"Then ask him what the friend called himself.
Not the name. What he said he was." Sonny puts the pen down.
"When the paper went bad, the same voice called again.
Said don't send anybody. Said the sister will come.
Said she'll go up the hill on her own, and Salvatore will take her in, because that's what Salvatore does, he takes things in that he shouldn't.
" He looks at the phone on the desk. "Said, I've known that girl since she was baptised. "
The woman folding in the laundromat looks up as I come through the curtain. She has not looked up once in the whole time, not when I went in and not for the four machines going, and she looks up now, at my face, and back down at the towel in her hands.
"Silvestri," she says. To the towel.
"Yes."
"He brought his shirts here. Your father. Tuesdays. Four white ones and he'd stand and wait for them, he wouldn't leave them." She folds. "Nobody waits for shirts."
I stand there a second. She does not look up again. I go out into New Dorp Lane with that in my hands like something I have been given and cannot put down.
Tommy has the engine running and the door open before I am across the road.
"He called," Tommy says.
"Who."
"Who do you think. Four times. I didn't pick up the first three." He holds his phone out through the window like it is hot. "You pick up."
I take it. It is already ringing. It rings once.
"Where are you." Salvatore. Very quiet.
"New Dorp."
"Sonny's."
"Yes."
"Get in the car."
"I'm getting in the"
"Get in the car, Marina, and tell Tommy to drive, and don't stop anywhere. Not a light, not a store. Nothing. Come home. Now."
"What's"
"Now."
I get in the car. Tommy pulls out before my door is shut, the way Luca does, and he goes up New Dorp Lane faster than the road wants, and I sit with his phone in my hand and the line still open and I can hear Salvatore breathing on it, and he is not saying anything, and I know his nothings, I have learned every one of them, and this one I have not heard before.
This one is a man who has just found something out.